Follow Us

Review: Hearing Ligeti’s Piano Concerto live is a rare blessing

Joshua KosmanMay 10, 2019Updated: May 11, 2019, 10:55 am

Pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard Photo: Julia Wesely

When Michael Tilson Thomas withdrew from this week’s San Francisco Symphony concerts because of illness and James Gaffigan suavely stepped in as a late replacement, there was a bit of program revision as a result. Thomas’ plans to record three major Debussy works for later release had to be shelved, at least for the time being.

Happily, the program’s main draw, the magnificent Piano Concerto of György Ligeti, survived the shuffle. And on Thursday, May 9, in Davies Symphony Hall, with pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard as the powerful and authoritative soloist, this exuberant, inventive masterpiece stood once again as the highlight of whatever concert program it inhabits.

This is no knock on Debussy, of course. Most of his orchestral music is, after all these years, as comfortable and welcome as an old slipper, and “La Mer” — the one piece of his that survived the rescheduling — concluded Thursday’s concert in a sumptuous, elegantly shaped series of oceanic swells.

But the chance to hear Ligeti’s Piano Concerto in concert is an all-too-rare blessing. It’s been 20 years since the Symphony last performed the work — then too with Aimard as soloist — and it still sparkles and dances with unabashed splendor.

There are several interlocking keys to this piece, which Ligeti first wrote in 1986 and then revised two years later to add two more movements to its original three-movement floor plan. One is the sparsely acerbic instrumentation, a chamber orchestra in which percussion and woodwinds figure prominently.

That in turn emphasizes the mechanistic aspect of much of Ligeti’s writing, with fleet, complex rhythms overlaid on one another like a large, exposed clockwork (the influence of Caribbean and African music is unmistakable). There are angular, abrasive harmonies, but with the edges rounded off — he’s like a Stravinsky without the attitude.

Ligeti, who died in 2006 at 83, was also an unparalleled virtuoso at hitting the listener’s heart and funny bone simultaneously. In the concerto’s slow second movement, a lone double bass sustains a hushed, almost subterranean note at great length, while various novelty instruments — a slide whistle, an ocarina, a chromatic harmonica — amble their way across the musical landscape like lost puppies. It’s a gorgeous stretch of tenderly observed absurdity.

And although the music’s effect can sometimes be disorienting to a first-time listener, it doesn’t take long to hear how firmly this piece aligns itself with the concerto tradition — even if Ligeti, as always, is both respectful and skeptical of the 19th century musical legacy. The pianist is called on to play technically demanding scales and trills (the third movement begins with a coiled hubbub at the center of the keyboard that then expands like a pianistic Big Bang), and there are cadenzas scattered throughout for show-off purposes.

Aimard rose superbly to the technical challenges of the piece, but more impressive still was his command of Ligeti’s ironies and ambiguities of tone — now sweetly inviting, now dry and sardonic. He had gallant partnership from Gaffigan and the orchestra, especially in the brisk third and fifth movements.

In place of two other Debussy works originally scheduled, Gaffigan offered the ghastly Bacchanale from Saint-Saëns’ “Samson et Dalila” — as cheesy and racist a collection of Orientalist hoochie-koochie as any composer of the 19th century ever penned — as well as the West Coast premiere of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s “Something for the Dark.” Written in 2016 on a commission for the Detroit Symphony, this turned out to be a loud, bluntly orchestrated triumphal narrative tracing the fortunes of a catchy melodic theme through various travails.

None of it approached the freshness or ingenuity of the Ligeti. Hopefully it won’t take another two decades for this gem of the repertoire to return.